On January 28, 2018, we had our first talk of the year by Prof. Lexing Ying, professor of Mathematics, entitled “The Mathematics Behind Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning”.  There has been tremendous development in the past several years in AI and ML, most notably the successes from deep neural networks. In this talk, Professor Ying discussed three stories:Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Medical Imaging. In each story, he showed how a simple and beautiful mathematical idea plays a key role in a modern AI/ML algorithm in a language that is understandable to the layman. The ticket to the talk was completely sold out 6 days before the event. The meeting room was fully packed and there were a lot of questions raised during the talk. What a popular topic, great talk, at the right time!